A Short History of an Aspirant Hack.

 

Patrick Marks was born in August 1950 in Staffordshire, England. A typical post-war, grammar school Leo of an arrogant disposition with ideas way above his station. Year of the Tiger as well…

After a short period living in London’s Notting Hill between 1968 and 1972, selling shoes in Portobello Road, (a time that is remembered only vaguely, due in part to the herbal and pharmaceutical research he eagerly carried out) he fled to the country where he studied (and had a good time!) at Madeley College of Education and Keele University between 1972 and 1976 for a degree in Education and Performing Arts. He then started performing education for six years, attempting to teach severely emotionally disturbed teenage boys. His short and dismal career as a short and dismal teacher can only be described as dismal and short.

He married Lesley in 1976, and so commenced their tumble through life together…

During his time at college, he developed an interest in stage lighting, ‘cos it meant getting into every social function for free. He now wishes he hadn’t.

In 1982 Patrick woke up one day in the back of a V.W. van with a small touring light rig, and no house (that's another story). After a few years as a penniless itinerant lighting designer, he finally burst onto the scene of international lighting designers in 1985.

He has remained penniless to this day in spite of having toured the world constantly with a variety of major and not so major rock bands.

The 80's saw Patrick working with British acts as varied as Aswad, Aztec Camera, Gary Numan, Five Star, Big Country, Andy Summers, The Christians, The Cross, and so on, all of which kept him busy and on the move.

Meanwhile, Joshua and Eleanor came along, and dad started to look for a way out of touring… he's still looking!

In 1989, Patrick joined, as their touring lighting designer, that quintessentially British rock band, Status Quo, with whom he remains to this day.

Patrick also worked in the film and television industry during the nineties, and pushed faders for shows like the "Brit Awards", “Big World Café”, “Wired” and other forgettable ‘pop’ shows. He lost count of all the mindless ‘pop’ videos that he worked on, but still smiles about the day he lit Vic Reeve’s video for “Dizzy”.

Despite Quo's hectic annual touring schedule, Patrick has also seized opportunities to light other acts during this time, including Nigel Kennedy and The Pretenders, and has become integrally involved in designing lighting for fashion shows including the world famous London Fashion Week.

Highlights of his diverse design career include the lighting of a 13-week television series about the history of orchestral music called “Orchestra!”  for Channel Four, presented by Sir Georg Solti and Dudley Moore.

He also lists Quo’s marathon “Rock Till You Drop” extravaganza in 1992, where they performed live in four arenas - Glasgow, Birmingham, London and Sheffield - in 11 hours and 11 minutes, as one of the most satisfying lighting projects he has organised.

In 1997 Patrick managed to realise one of his life long passions… to fly. He obtained his Private Pilot's Licence in December 1997. He now enjoys thrashing about the skies of Norfolk in a Piper Warrior.

One day he will get off the road and write his book.

In the meantime he continues to write anything for anyone that will read it…

Booze 'n' Lose

 Time on your hands then everything all at once. First in, last out. This was the lampies' lot. 'Standing by' for days on end at rehearsals. Those long empty afternoons on tour that followed an early load in and quick focus. Nothing to do 'til show time but explore a local bar or crack open a bottle of cabernet sauvignon on the tour 'bus.  

Its 1985. The gigantic lighting rig clung precariously to the low roof of the Pinewood rehearsal studio. It was just past pub chucking out time, yet yours truly had been pushing matrix pins into the old Avolites 84 way desk for hours, accompanied as usual by a trusty dimmer man and the client/pop star, Gary Numan.

The pop star in question took a keen interest in his lights and would sit beside me all night as we played the rehearsal tape, pushed in the pins and slowly taught bank upon bank of stage lighting to paint pictures for us.

Gary relished the number of lamps in the air; some kind of penis compensation thing, I think. He would point to any gaps in this already biblical rig and whimper for more. A snap 'full up' made the serried rows of dimmers jump two feet in the air and the runway lights at Heathrow would go dim.

A falling-through-empty-lighting-racks-in-the-dark sound introduced 'Dave' and his friend. They had been drinking long and loudly. Pushing us aside with an oblivious, "Scuse me, hic, me friends gorra great idea!" Dave proceeded to attack the desk with a screwdriver and beery enthusiasm. We humoured him as he exposed the innards of the desk. We pleaded with him as he started to remove modules. Gary, a bemused non-drinker, stood back as dimmer man and I explained that now was not a good time. 

Dave, now aware of the pop star's presence, paused in his rambling, incoherent explanation of turning the desk into a super-computer and gushed loudly over the star, pumping his hand up and down in excited recognition.

As I poured the bibacious pair out of the room I heard the star ask, "Who the fuck was that?" Faster than a bulb popping, trusty dimmer man replies, "Oh, that was Dave. He's the rigger." Now the rigger is the man who hangs it all in the air...

Gary looked up open-mouthed at the creaking heavy metal monster swinging gently from its chains, then looked in the direction of the retreating dipsos and turned a colour I had only ever seen before in geriatric wards. Dimmer man, faster than a fuse popping, replied, "Never mind mate, just try and stand in the gaps!" Dave was history by the time I got back to the desk.

It's now 1987. The lighting rig was up and flashed through. The sun shone brightly on to the stage as the sound department moved in.  Whilst waiting for God to pull down his great Master Fader in the sky, we did what an LD and his crew did; adjourned to the pub for "something to eat", there being no fayre at this fair Christian rock festival. Sunset and lighting focus was at pub closing time.

Now Robert, my main man, enjoyed a cider or two on a sunny afternoon and anyway sunset was ages away; he'd stop sipping cider way before focus time, he assured himself…

Across the moonless blackness of the field on our way back we all congratulated ourselves in booze induced bonhomie. The rig had gone up a treat; it all worked and a quick focus meant bed, followed by four easy days of pushing faders for a couple of hours a night.

"Next!" I shouted into the wind and darkness of the upstage truss, cursing myself for not getting the intercom rigged. The underhung Sil 30 did not come on. "Next!" I bellowed once more. "It's up, it's on!!" a distant out-front voice replied.  The Sil remained obstinately off.

Robert, hanging fifteen feet above me, growled then slurred loudly, "Fuck! Oohh…" This was immediately followed by a deep plummeting sigh, a heavy thud to my right, yet another thud, a few seconds silence, then sustained groaning. Robert had dropped off the truss - an eighteen foot plummet. Fortunately, by cleverly bouncing off the recently set up sound monitor desk onto an up-ended wedge monitor, he broke his fall somewhat before finally arriving on the stage to a sprinkle of applause from two security guards.

Some emergency work light revealed the groaning Robert, too drunk to writhe, on his back gasping, "I'm aww..uuh..right..uuh..I'll..uuh..oww..go back..uhh..up". A quick examination revealed no obvious life threatening damage, but his right arm didn't seem to be quite the same shape as his left. Between gasps for air and gut wrenching groans, he grinned that cider grin that feels no pain. Robert was legless. Still he protested, "I'm..uuh..uhh..OK..uuh..notdrunk..uhh..only..oww..uuh..winded." 

Robert escaped with a broken arm, a couple of broken ribs, severe bruising and the loss of his job. The monitor desk was also replaced. The wedge monitor won and the focus was done.

Forward to 1995. Pablo, a young moving light technician on his first tour, was detailed to operate the lighting desk for the support act. This night the obviously distressed opening act soldiered on as two automated moving lights neurotically performed a bizarre and frenetic moving/strobing effect above them. They were the only lights on. The band was singing a slow ballad. There was no 'Pablo' at the desk.

A young sound rigger banged on the door of a back stage toilet yelling, "Pablo! Pablo! You'll have to get outta there. I think the boss has noticed you're not there. I can't run your desk as well. Pablo!"  The large amount of gin and tonic Pablo had guzzled during a social afternoon with a rigger, before the dinner he never ate, had kicked in viciously.

The door of the toilet opened. Not 'Pablo', but the large frame of 'Malcolm', a pissed off production manager, was revealed to the surprised young sound rigger. Pablo had crawled to the bus and passed out after leaving the contents of his stomach in pools over the loading bay. The game was up. Pablo, as a new boy, was chastised but forgiven this time. We'd all done it once, hadn't we?

Two weeks later on a day off in a small seaside town in Denmark, noted for its women and nightlife, Pablo had gone out to enjoy, for himself, the wonders of Danish beer and blonde, blue eyed beauties he had heard about from the older boys.

 It wasn't until late the next morning after Pablo hadn't appeared on stage, his boxes of expensive high technology still firmly shut, that a hungover crew chief suggested that Malcolm call Pablo's room. There was no answer. A trip to the hotel was called for. Malcolm was not amused.

 Much subsequent banging and kicking on his door did not appear to rouse Pablo either. Housekeeping eventually opened the door to find a bed unslept in and bags unpacked. No Pablo.

Had he got lucky? Was he, even as Malcolm mentally calculated the cost and logistics of flying him home later that day, enjoying erotic delights with a sexually abandoned Danette?  Well, not exactly…He was shivering in a Danish police cell after being pulled out of the window of a sex shop in the early hours.

Chased by bloodthirsty young Vikings from a bar after attempting to solicit the favours of a local girl, Pablo, in blind drunken terror, had attempted escape on an old pushbike he had found parked outside the bar. Peddling wildly and looking behind, he had ridden full tilt through the sex shop window. Oh, how the Vikings laughed.  

After his arrest he told the police he was the drummer with the big English rock band in town and by the time Malcolm had discovered his unfortunate whereabouts, the story of "Rock Band's Drunken Drummer Breaks Into Danish Sex Shop" had already got back to the U.K. press.

After large amounts of cash were handed over to the Danish 'authorities', Pablo was repatriated with the utmost expediency. He was not booked for the following tour.

But that was all in the bad old days. Times have now changed in this professional, safety conscious 21^st century. Or so I've been told. They have, haven't they…? 

A Summer Rock Diary Part 2

June, curse her sodden soul, is left mercifully behind amongst the skips of broken dreams, next to the dark load-out dock of the desolate Arena Nova. She weeps her wet and incompetent last tears of apology. A local promoter smiles behind the wheel of his BMW M3.

“ It’s OK,” he tells himself, “so the guitars buzzed a bit. Only when the lights flashed on and off. Punters didn’t notice. It was the band’s crew that got all precious about it. What’s wrong with sound and light off the same mains supply anyway? That extra generator they said they needed would have cost me a new set of alloy wheels. Sod 'em…” He roars off into the rain.

The sodium lights of Weiner Neustadt’s Arena turn the rain the colour of urine as we lurch towards July and Leipzig.

We’re now about halfway through a series of outdoor/indoor festival/local production shows. We left our own sound and light production behind some five weeks ago; we now live off local production and have survived fire, flood and riot, together with the odd roof collapse and backstage invasion of Austrian over-70s ramblers.

My diary has taken a hypercritically jaundiced view of most of the events thus far, largely brought about by hours of sitting bored shitless on a tour bus, abandoned in axle deep mud behind some far flung outdoor stage. The endless bill of local bands thumps its muffled way backwards out of the PA into the inner sanctity of the bunk, whilst rain drums its own rhythms on the roof. The trenchfoot, now suffered by all, disinclines anyone from paddling to catering to be disappointed by cold boiled rice, pickled salad and ten different ways of preparing dead pig. Again. Such is the glamour of the festival circuit this first summer of a brave new century.

Consoling myself with a post-show bottle of France’s finest red, I enjoy the carpeted comfort, safety and predictability that the Hotel Phoenix affords with its well appointed back lounge. I consign the fax-mangled drawing of the forthcoming Ukrainian show, where every colour and channel is ‘fuzzyblob’, to the half-open open roof hatch. We trundle north through the wet night and low cloud of Bavaria towards the angst of an outdoor show in East Germany. On Euro 2000 cup final day.

Though the weather threatens to improve, I wonder if the control of all those extra outdoor show variables will? Will the stage be flat? Will the power be good? Will the powers that be be capable?

Leipzig, Germany, 2^nd. July.

The huge crowd roars in the packed amphitheatre as Germany scores the winning goal in the final few minutes. The gigantic video screens, hanging each side of the monstrous stage, show close-ups of jubilant Germans gyrating with joy in Amsterdam. Here in Leipzig the evening will be rounded off with a rousing set by one of the world’s leading exponents of twelve-bar blues. The sun sets slowly on this warm, still evening as stage crew smile their relaxed way through final checks before The Turn hit the stage in front of an exuberant audience drunk on victory…

Well, that’s the way the promoter saw it when he set the gig up months earlier. Reality is France v Italy on a wet day in Leipzig, with a slightly smaller production than originally conceived…

The small, yet adequate, lighting rig (promoter’s description) is up and running when we arrive to load in at midday, unlike the white tablecloth being used for video back projection by a puzzled video crew. Lacking both the necessary lenses and available depth behind the suspended tablecloth to project an image any larger than their combined IQ, they come up with the idea of reflecting the image off a dressing-room mirror to double the projection distance. We all admire the crisp focus and sharp colours of the back-to-front image listing to port above the drum riser.

 The black parcans and Source 4s look, and indeed are, brand new. And there’s a good looking girlie on the lighting crew! Keen as mustard she shimmies up the ladder to focus with the grace and speed of a heavily pregnant Brachiosaurus. We focus the first lamp bar inside forty minutes. By lamp three of the second lamp bar she is trying to re-focus the first lamp bar. She can’t see the stage and move a lamp at the same time. A sort of Gerald Ford of the truss, really. I ask her to spin a ‘porcelain’. She asks me what a ‘porcelain’ is. Her boyfriend/dimmer man shouts something loud in German. She begins to cry. I do not lose my temper. Instead, an odd thing happens.

 “I’ll show you.” I say, and find myself climbing a truss ladder and dragging my way towards her. What am I doing? I don’t do this anymore. I’m too old an uninsurable.

“Look, this is the porcelain and if you turn it like this…” 240 volts crash through my arm as I put my hand in the back of the brand new parcan. Tempted as I am to say, “Now you have a go,” I tell her that the ‘porcelains’ all look fine to me, and perhaps they’d be better if we let them be.

 With a few wet and bedraggled Billy peering at a small screen hung crookedly off string at the back of the leaking stage, the sound engineer groans as France score the equaliser in injury time.

“Does that mean we have to hang about in this ‘til the end of extra time?” We both pray for an early Golden Goal.

The match re-commences as the screen cuts to a picture of a snowstorm with no sound. After three minutes the crowd becomes restless. Their damp displeasured faces are turned towards the out-front mix position. We shrug and smile back. The screen crackles and flickers back to football seconds before Italy finally succumbs to France.

The Turn do their bit and then we eat our load-out sandwiches (mayo, always soddin’ mayo!) watching the condensation dribble down the windows of the Hotel Phoenix. A drum tech is heard to wail, “Outdoor shows! Every day is a week.”

Konstanz, Germany, 10^th July.

It’s a tent today, a great big blue and yellow plastic circus affair. At least we are out of the rain. The lighting rig is a bizarre collection of old 1kw and 2kw fresnels, forty or so parcans and a few old Lekos clinging to truss and scaff pipe skilfully, yet daringly, strapped and bolted to anything in or near the tent roof that looks vaguely like a hanging point.

The rig is devoid of colour or patch. I’m handed a plot and asked to fill it in. Rule # 1 kicks in – ‘Set realistic goals, given the time, equipment, and crew expertise available.’ I have a man, a ladder and two hours at my disposal to colour, patch, focus and program.

“I’ve got this great idea for a white light show…” I enthuse.

The ubiquitous guitar buzz delays doors by 45 minutes as dimmers are turned on and off once more and heavy cable is dragged across muddy fields towards some distant sub-station. The audience stands mute in the rain outside, waiting.

As The Turn hit the stage, thick fogs rises from the several thousand soggy but, by now, hot punters. Best cracked oil effect I’ve seen in years. Some short time later, as the warm fog meets the cold plastic roof, it begins to rain indoors. Umbrellas start to appear. My desk is covered in plastic sheets. I’m operating in Braille again. Summer is starting to take on a distinctly surreal countenance and is careering towards the banal and absurd. How many more 20th century theatre genres must we endure before the end? Or is it all one long act of cruelty, scripted by Antonin Artaud?

Hamm, Germany. 12^th July

Alleluia! There is a God! We are indoors; it’s a regular gig. The promoter has looked at my drawings and I have a rig I recognise as something approaching ‘appropriate’ (that simple little word in our technical rider that seems to be continually overlooked) hanging gracefully from a dozen Lodestars.

It’s ten in the morning and after a hearty breakfast of bacon and egg (real bacon and egg, for Christ’s sake!) I’m given a Diamond 3 desk and a Mac 500 head to play with in the corner. I happily program a show. Meanwhile the crew pad around quietly and efficiently hanging the 20 Mac 500s, 10 Source 4s, 8 Megastrobes and 200 parcans. We seem to be in control.  Then I notice a familiar face on the German crew that makes me feel uneasy. He’s patching dimmers with a hammer, surrounded by hillocks of knotted and unmarked Socapex cable. Now I remember. He was the rigger in charge of a large 6-leg floor support system I’d used earlier in the year. He takes nine hours to patch two 72 way racks.

Rankweil, Austria. 14^th July.

I’m using the Bryan Adams rig today - or the bits of it that the humble support act are allowed to use. But it’s not here yet and isn’t expected ‘till noon at the earliest.

 An overnight drive from Frieburg has all the residents of the Hotel Phoenix out scouring the site for those disgusting little blue boxes that you have to use before anyone else renders them unusable. “Yes, the toilets will be here after lunch,” smiles Gerhard, the local promoter’s rep. “But my turtle’s head needs tending to NOW!” wails a grimacing stage manager. Seven sets of clenched buttocks wait patiently for the cab to take them to the local sports hall. Not everyone will make it. The Adam’s trucks arrive accompanied by Wagnerian thunder and rain. The LSD crew, fresh from Holland, steam in.

Willie Williams, responsible for the fantastic, nearly all white light, low tech Bryan Adams rig, has thoughtfully insisted on his Avo Diamond 2 desk being placed stage right on a platform ten feet above the guitar techs instead of on the cold and distant FOH tower. I thank him from the bottom of my heart. No long stumble through the mud and bullets to get out front. The LSD crew, led by the incredible Mark ‘Scratch’ Hitchcock, thank him from the bottom of their heart too, as a combination of agents, promoters and truck breakdowns mean that the load in for this gig doesn't start ‘til midday. In the rain, of course.

The four cross-stage trusses carrying a simple mixture of Parcans, Source 4 Zooms and Source 4 Pars in open white, CTB and CTO, together with Willie’s wonderful backdrop of Chinese-built white rope light in aluminium frames, go up in no time.

 Even the floor kack goes in quickly. 5kw Fresnels on sticks, a bunch of strobes, some dimmable florries and soft lights surround the white Marshall stacks each side of a minimal white drum kit.

The position of the lighting desk means that the desk operator can see and talk to every man in the grid during the swift, windswept focus. No need to bellow through the thunder and lightning that blighted this and so many outdoor shows this summer. The treck across the Somme to the out front position with a Diamond 2 desk (the long one) strapped to your back, towing a multicore through the cold liquid chocolate is an experience thus largely avoided.

Not entirely, however, as five Super Troopers have to be floated on pontoons to a pair of exceptionally high towers, where a SAR Sea King helicopter lifts them into place. The Troopers are the only source of colour.

As the infamous Scratch said, “Low tech! I love it! Willie is demonstrating that less is more, and because there are no moving heads or colour changers, just a bunch of dimmers, the rig is quick, reliable and adaptable. It’s ideal for situations like this. And the show looks great as well!”

I take my sou’wester off to you, Mr. Williams.

Kiev, Ukraine. July 19^th

We find ourselves enduring a six-hour incarceration in a small ‘in transit’ room at Kiev airport with all the free vodka we can drink. As we wait for the connecting flight to Nikolaiv, we try to assess exactly what we are stumbling into.

We have been told, “Out doors. Biggest event in the Ukraine. Massive national television audience. Luxury accommodation,” but we have no technical details and a lack of details always makes me nervous. They tell me they have managed to secure the only Avo desk in the Ukraine for my exclusive use. But an Avo what? I ask.

Four months of negotiations with the Ukrainian promoter and I’ve extracted one fax-mangled drawing of a lighting rig that appears to be a post-revolutionary constructivist interpretation of my social realist Autocad original.

We will be staying on a ‘luxury’ steam-ship called the ‘Maxim Rysky’, anchored in Kakhova, a small port on the Black Sea, a few miles west of Odessa, and north of the Crimean peninsular. Was this to be another pointless charge into that Valley of Death? But I am no Light Brigade! I’m only a solitary LD!

I point out to the tour manager that ‘Maxim Rysky’ is Russian for ‘Extreme Danger’. He argues that the Russian for ‘extreme danger’ is ‘Ukrainian International Airline’ as we board the small charter plane to Nikolaiv. We are relieved to see the captain throw away his half-empty bottle of vodka as he enters the flight deck.

Arrival at Nikolaiv is something of a blur… stretch limousines and police cars, buses and vans, and lots of cameras. So begins a two-hour, high-speed, police-escorted convoy across the dark Bad Lands of southern Ukraine with full siren and blue flashing lights - with roadside urination stops every twenty minutes. 

Midnight and just checked into the boat. I spread the single blanket over the pull-down bunk bed of the cabin that is my ‘luxury room’. A speaker above the bunk bellows loudly at me in Russian. It won’t turn off. It does this at odd times throughout the day and night for the next two days. A very loud sound system is pumping out 300 bpm on the deck of the sister ship next door.

We are called to the outdoor stage, built on the harbour’s edge, a short walk across water via a Russian army pontoon bridge.

Expecting to see a rig and stage similar to the drawing I‘d thrown out of the Hotel Phoenix roof, the bizarre, over-sized set that is being hastily nailed together by a committee of chippies takes me somewhat by surprise. I look up to see the vague shape of my rig swamped and surrounded by what must be the entire collection of Ukrainian lighting technology. Design by Politburo. My rig has been shoehorned into this aerial mess as an ‘added extra’. My front truss, carrying all my key light, is rigged fifteen feet behind the mic line. I reach for the St. John’s Wort.

Olga, the nice young English-speaking lady from the lighting company explains, “Well the TV people sort of took over and changed a few things and we didn’t want to upset you…”

Out front I am introduced to the six non-English speaking desk operators behind the seven lighting control desks. “It’s OK, I will translate your cues as you call the show,” says Olga. Yeah, right!  The seventh desk is mine, an old Avo Sapphire with an EPROM problem. It keeps corrupting memory as I roll from page to page. “Oh yes, it does that,” Olga smiles helpfully. A fraught overnight focus commences.

July 21^st. Show day.

I hand out cue notes to all concerned and set about swearing at the desk for 6 hours as it refuses to remember the cues I’m trying to teach it.

The Turn hit the stage and it’s every man for himself as cue chaos reigns and notes are scattered to the wind. A dozen Russian voices bellow their tongue-twisted language over the headsets. Each desk operator improvises a free-form dialectic version of our show. I close my eyes and randomly push faders whose contents bear no resemblance to their legends.

The billowing smoke and mixed pizza that is now the stage reminds me of an old Soviet joke: ‘We know that you can turn an aquarium into fish soup; the question is, can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?’

We have three sleepless after-show hours in our cabin before we leave for Nikolaiv, then home, with an old Ukrainian proverb ringing in our ears: ‘There will be trouble if the cobbler starts making pies.’

Skanderborg, Denmark. August 10^th.

 ‘Danmarks Smukkeste Festival’ or ‘Denmark’s Most Beautiful Festival’ is set in the undulating beech woods of a deer park next to a large lake. Skanderborg’s four day festival is a more laid back and grown-up Glastonbury, without the ‘poseur’ element. Twenty thousand visitors enjoy five stages of rock, techno, dance and good food. This is my fifth visit and I can’t wait…

Organised by the five thousand volunteers of the Skanderborg Festival Club, led by Walther, a four hundred and twenty-year-old woodland troll, it is an oasis set in a desert of festivals. Backstage catering in Walther’s VIP restaurant is the pinnacle of ‘al fresco’ cuisine. White linen tablecloths, waiter service, good food and fine wine.

 The two brand new and much improved main stages sit proudly side-by-side carrying identical lighting rigs. There’s none of that ‘A’ stage or ‘B’ stage class-ridden nonsense here. Everyone is treated to the same excellent facilities. The rig hasn’t changed in years and plans can always be downloaded from their website at anytime. A hundred or so parcans and some moles, a few colour changers with a sprinkling of VL5s and Studio LP 1200s controlled from an Avo Diamond 1 and a Whole Hog all make for the perfect little long, light, summer evening, no-room-for-egos rig.

I’d given Murphy, the Whole Hog operator, his cue notes last night, so after a quick session on the Diamond at lunchtime, following a quick tweak of my specials, I’m relaxed and ready to rock.

Apart from a confused Dane who decides to crash into our out-front mixing bunker through the roof, the show went without incident. I even opened a bottle of wine for the show.

Skanderborg is a supremely well organised festival that sees the comfort and dignity of the punter as the most important element, and is determined to guarantee a stress-free time for all those onstage and backstage, and succeeds. Skanderborg seems to have all those extra little outdoor variables covered more than any other festival I can remember. It should be made a compulsory visit for all those organisers of the outdoor shambles and rip-offs I’ve stumbled through this summer.

But they wouldn’t have the time, would they. As I write this they’re already organising next year’s disasters …

A Summer Rock Diary - part 1

Ah! The halcyon days of summer. The outdoor show time of year when Lighting Designers and sound engineers, drum techs and drivers gather together in fields foreign, green and sunsoaked, to enjoy the music and hospitality of the Great European Festival’s Mixed Bill. Three months of tents and gazebos, boiled rice and pork, shorts and suntan lotion punctuated by intermittent bursts of airline alcohol.

OK, so you’ve only had a ten minute programming slot on a lighting desk you’d once heard about, yet prayed you’d never encounter, to program fifty TurboScans, as the sun bleaches out the stage, with a desk operator that speaks no English. And it’s a drag that none of the colours in the stage lights are ones that you would be seen dead in; there aren’t enough lights and the promoter didn’t bother sending your plot to the lighting company anyway.

But, hey! The punters are all happily drunk and the sun’s out, so stick in a few colour washes, check on your specials and key light and head off to hospitality, where a bunch of buddies you haven’t seen in ages are swapping tales, telephone numbers and ‘T’ shirts.

As ‘summer evenings’ and ‘outdoors’ usually equals ‘light’ in Northern Europe, then the job of the LD can be reduced to a literal white wash, and the outdoor experience can be enjoyed the more! Or less, depending on your ‘precious’ handicap.

You may be, for instance, one of that strange breed of LDs that insists on flashing banks of heavily coloured Smarties on and off in broad daylight whilst a twenty five knot wind deposits the entire output of a dozen F100 smoke machines onto Monitor City. The band play in the gloomy half light of shadows as, once again, you realise the impossibility of getting anywhere near your production look whilst His Great Light In The Sky is on.

Thus it is, all over Europe. From Reykjavik to Oporto, Glastonbury to Kiev, everybody has to have an outdoor show. Build a stage and stick on a few bands, preferably in a totally impractical location. A Swiss mountain top in a snow storm, a Norwegian quartz quarry below sea level and a railway station in Brussels spring to mind amongst the most recently bizarre sites I’ve had the misfortune to cope with. Get a brewery or ciggie company to cough up some dosh, a few fireworks to finish…easy, innit?

Well, not quite. It’s those extra variables that creep into the equation that make the outdoor show such a risky platform for live entertainment, as I discovered this summer. We had rain. We had biblical rain where, as Genesis says, (the biblical writer, not the biblical band)  “…all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” (C.7, V11)

‘Glast’, as we now know, is an Anglo-Saxon word for ‘rain’ and ‘on bury’ it certainly does and did. I hear ‘Party in the Park’ was a bit of a boat ride too. I think that was the night I saw Bryan Adams play to 10,000 cold and rain-soaked Austrians in a Rankwiel swamp after I had done my bit with The Turn supporting. Meanwhile backstage, a Creationist truck driver suffering from trenchfoot marched local farm animals up a ramp, two by two, into his trailer and set off into the night screaming something about Mount Ararat and olive leaves.

But it’s not just the rain, is it? It’s generators blowing up, roof threatening to fall in, plots being ignored, local crews being crap, local rigs being naff, catering being non-existent, desks not working and a general lack of feeling of being in control. The ‘attention to detail’ that we can all concentrate on when we carry our own production and crew often degenerates into a scramble to get even your basics happening when confronted with a local promoter’s idea of what is needed to light your show.

What follows are some extracts from my diary for June. All incidents are true, some trivial, some not.

Germany, Plauen. June 1^st.  10.00 a.m.

 The curtains of my bunk twitch open. The face of Steve Arch, lighting crew chief, looks worried. Unusual. “You’d better come and have a look at this one…” So starts the day that was to end with riot police.

I am lead to a crumbling ‘al fresco’ concrete platform with a meagre roof that still has ‘Ikea’ stickers on its main supports. Rigger, Johnny Hotpants, is looking woefully at the flimsy piece of downstage ladder beam with two green span sets attached. With incredulity in his eyes and terror in his voice he whispers hoarsely,  “The house rigger says that’s for our front truss.”

Drawings are produced, architect’s reports and certificates conjured up by local promoters, voices are raised. We are unconvinced by their calculations and arm waving protestations of safety and assurances that we could fly a U-boat from this roof. We prefer to operate on a common sense prediction of what will happen if we try to hang a fully loaded forty-foot truss, with bells and whistles, off an ‘Ikea’ gazebo.

Eventually a practical demonstration is called for…

“Truss moving!” It doesn’t. The Lodestars eagerly devour the chain. The chain goes tight and the roof bends and slowly comes down to meet us. Our point made, we retir to the safety of the Hotel Phoenix whilst the raised voices continue long into the afternoon.

During the afternoon a goodly number of loyal punters have been arriving and drinking the local fighting-and-falling-down liquid at a bar adjacent to the load in/out. At 5.30 the raised voices stop and the inevitable load out begins. By 6.30, police in riot gear carrying big sticks arrive to pull the drunk and ugly crowd off our stage manager as he desperately tries to shovel truck loads of production back onto the trucks, whilst they push it violently and erratically back to the stage. I dunno, I’m just an LD…

Steinbach, East Germany. 10^th. June.

Built in the fifties for the amusement of the occupying force, the Russian Army provided today’s stage. Hidden in the dank depths of a forest in former East Germany this amphitheatre can only be accessed by cross loading the contents of our mighty Transam pantechnicons onto two tiny tail-lift trucks. These then judder and jerk their way through the dense spruce canopy down a steep and twisty track, edged by sudden vertical drops, to the small backstage area. Though slow, the load in has gone without incident… in daylight.

Show over, and the reverse of the load in gets under way…in the dark. The small backstage area is well lit, unlike the tortuous track, and full of rock show associated paraphernalia. The first truck arrives, front end first. Quickly realising that lack of space means the truck will have to reverse in to load, it is sent off, in reverse, back up the dark and twisted track to find somewhere to turn around.

A post-show reverie and stroll through the woods, is startlingly interrupted as the back end of a truck appeared suddenly and violently through dense undergrowth fifteen feet above me. Wheels spinning noisily in the fresh air as it rocks gently up and down, deciding whether or not to complete the plummet. I fumble my way up the embankment to the front end of the truck. The German driver is thrashing about in the dark, swearing and kicking his truck, whose front end now completely blocks the load out track. Its back end hangs impotently and precariously in the air.

 Much arm waving follows as the load out stopped dead. The truck blocks any way of getting another vehicle into a position to pull it out. Suggestions of pushing it over the edge to get it out of the way don’t go down too well with truck owner, so after an hour of hair brained schemes involving Lodestar motors, trees and pulleys, we call the fire brigade!

A little red terrier of a four-wheel drive fire truck pants excitedly onto the scene, revs its engine for a bit, and then shoots off into the black forest to appear two minutes later in front of the beached truck. Winches are connected, and the little red terrier drags the truck out by the scruff of its neck to cheers and applause.

The truck now sheds hydraulic fluid over the track, coughs and refuses to move. The little red terrier is called once again to drag it into the woods where both driver and truck are shot. It starts to rain. The load out proceeds with a single truck, slowly. Dawn breaks as our Transam transport trundles away.

Abrantes, Portugal. 14^th. June.

We say a tearful ‘good-bye’ to our LSD production and are having to battle our way through the rest of summer using whatever the locals think my drawing means. 

I appear to be lucky today. A rig is hanging at head height that strongly resembles my own festival rig… It is! And all in the right place too!  I scamper beaming across the stage towards three very tidy looking Avo 72 way racks, to be greeted with smiles and a copy of my own plot. The sun is hot; the location is cool. There’s an endless view over undulating hills of vines and olive groves to distant mountains. Eager stagehands joyfully push colour into Parcans and sing simple folk songs whilst dusky maidens offer me cold beer and food. The crew chief tells me, ”Everything is the way you want it. Would a 3.00 p.m. focus be OK?” I fall at his feet as he shows me the trusted old Celco 90 way desk, in the shade, ready to program blind. Today is good.

3.00 p.m. and we’ve finished flashing through the rig, ready to focus. And it all works!

6.00 p.m. Focus is a distant memory and I’ve long since whacked a show in the desk. I’m now fiddling with the smoke machine, looking for things to do.

“We must test the generator,” he says, as a small black cloud moves momentarily across the sun. “We must put all the lights to full for ten minutes,” he says as the sound of a distant siren sings in my head.

The generator coughs its usual black smoke for a few seconds as 300 Parcans all scream “Me! Me! Me!” then settle down to apparently purr quietly. Two minutes later the rig goes off. “Nuff of a soak test, then,” I think as I turn to see the generator belching thick black smoke.

But not smoke from the exhaust. In fact, smoke from everywhere but the exhaust. Black smoke is quickly followed by a volcano of orange and yellow balls of flame boiling their way up towards the clear blue sky. We all run away. I fall over four policemen in the rush.

The Portuguese fire department arrive to find the generator’s owner on his knees in the road beside his machine, weeping uncontrollably as the last of the flames died to leave a smoking, melted wreck. It’s a bank holiday in Portugal, and it’s 7.00 p.m.

“That’ll be the lighting gennie, then,” I mutter and get back onto the Hotel Phoenix.

Aalborg,Denmark. 23^rd.June.

Laid back Scandinavian affair spread over three stages and four days. In spite of our late appearance the first half of the show will be in daylight, so I’m looking forward to a nice easy day.

Klaus, my man for the day, introduces me to the ubiquitous Avo Pearl that controls the 10 bars of six hung from anywhere that the low roof allowed. Mainly white light, with three colour tints from the back. Some Source 4 profiles (they’re everywhere this summer!) and four Mac. 600s. Perfect for a near daylight show.

The rain is with us again, and the hay-scattered field is now an alligator infested swamp. 

Klaus is Danish, but has an Eton School accent, which may inspire a misplaced confidence in his thoroughness. Looking back, that large bottle of Cognac under his hammock should have told me… 

I’m perched on a box next to a follow spot I’m not using, fifteen feet above the sound desk. Klaus has just left. It’s show time. I play with white light for a bit until it gets dark enough for colour to kick in. I push the fader marked ‘RED’. The stage turns blue. I push the fader marked ‘BLUE’ and the stage goes red. I reach for the intercom, but there isn’t one. Then the single Pearl desk light pops its little clogs and I can’t see my hands in front of me.

 I can’t see the soddin’ desk! I’m operating by Braille! I frantically grope for the ‘blind mode’ button I’d seen somewhere once, praying that those clever people at Avo had foreseen this very situation. They hadn’t.

 As the battery dies on my mini Maglite clasped between my teeth, I see Klaus reeling across the field with his Cognac lifted high and his head tipped back. I push what I think should be the audience blinders in an attempt to get some light on my desk. The Turn go into a slow ballad. A battery of strobe lights machine-gun their way into the punters faces. Klaus falls over…I die.

Dessel, Belgium. 25^th. June.

It’s ‘Graspop’, a huge heavy metal festival. Lighting supplied by EML of Brussels. It’s good to see friendly and competent faces and little VLP*ä stickers on every piece of equipment. I’ve inherited Martin Brennan’s Iron Maiden rig, here the previous night. I’d seen the plot weeks before and was looking forward to playing with it. Until I got here. The promoter had decided that he couldn’t afford the full Monty for two nights, so had removed all the moving heads and colour changers leaving me with five gigantic colour washes. But very nice washes they were to, Martin!

 The drummer fell off his riser tonight and trashed some of my strobe and DWE loaded Marshall cabs. The rain continues…

Weiner Neustadt, Austria. 1^st. July.

Why is Austria so difficult? Three simple shows and all of them blighted by a dirge of excuses and apologies.

For the first we are taken to a small brewery, next to a castle, with a pretty little beer garden and a tiny wooden ‘oompah band’ platform at one end…with a tree in front of The Star’s mike position. I giggle as ‘the lighting rig’, two six lamp bars with no colour, is trimmed at two metres on top of two wind-up stands. The drum tech queries the practicality of the venue as his riser now occupies the entire stage area. Out front is log-jammed with boxes. The stage manager mutters something about “…shovelling two tonnes of shit into a one tonne pot,” as dozens of aged Austrian ramblers invade, march into the cellar bar that is doubling as catering and production office, and demand beer and bratwurst. 

“Yes, of course, when Deep Purple played here, we built a proper stage in the car park at the top of the hill, but they said it was unsafe…”

 We load out. Piss-ups and breweries?

Number two is outdoors. One of those stages that magically folds out of a truck. The rig arrives two hours late and is dumped in an unmarked heap of metal and cable in front of four bemused and confused lighting techs. They haven’t been given a plot. I draw one. The guy that seems to know what he’s doing leaves, “to do, I must, another show.” Eight hours, much cursing and arm waving later the rig is patched, sort of. But the desk isn’t, and the doors are now open and the Fender guitar with the single coil pick-up sounds like a chainsaw every time it goes anywhere near its jack plug. “Have you seen the state of the mains? Two phases for lights and one for sound and backline!” the stage manager wails. Arms are waved and voices raised. The power is turned off just as I start to program the desk…

Show three. Big new arena on an airfield. Same crew, same rig, same comedy of errors. Though hot-patched successfully yesterday, nothing was marked. So today, match the Socapex to the dimmer becomes a six-hour circus entertainment, as a lighting crew argue their way around three floor-supported trusses, randomly cross plugging cable.

Eventually, desk checked and rig focused, I wander outside to the airstrip to hitch a ride in one of the gliders I’d noticed being catapulted to a thousand feet, then set gloriously free. Circling idly, two thousand feet above the arena and chasing therms, I am tranquilly unaware of the old, bearded Austrian, beer in hand, pulling Socapex out of the (still!) unmarked dimmer racks below.   

The familiar noise of a chainsaw through a PA system welcomes me back to earth, followed closely by, “Pat, your lights are making the guitars buzz again!” Now, I’m only an LD…

I check the desk. Nothing comes up as marked. Ten minutes to show time and hoards of people are huddled around the dimmers. “Take that one out again. Yeah, that’s better. Now how about this one? Great! Its getting quieter…”

I do the show with half the rig unplugged as the guitars buzz and fart their way through the evening. Over a mournful bottle of after-show wine in the Hotel Phoenix I try to make sense of June and the fax-blurred plot for the big Ukrainian outdoor television show in July.

Flying With The Paras

 

Status Quo had been booked to play an outdoor show in Germany for some British troops just back from a tour of duty in Kosova. The stage was on an airfield used to train some of Britain’s finest crack troops – The Parachute Regiment. As trussing was slowly being trundled towards the stage, the Paras were being thrown out of a twin engine ‘plane in the clear blue sky, high above us. Could I beg a ride, I wondered? Producing my recently acquired Private Pilot’s Licence, I asked the nice officer-in-charge whether I could, perhaps, commit aviation in their ‘plane. In spite of my dishevelled, rock ‘n’ roll appearance, he seemed delighted to accommodate me and arrangements were made.

A stern sergeant in a red beret, green fatigues and shiny black boots came to escort me to the aircraft parked on the grass strip at the other side of the field from our stage. Giving me a short safety briefing in the MPV on the way around the peri-track, he explained that, as this was a grown-up soldier’s airplane, with two propellers, driven by a pair of powerful turbine engines, I wouldn’t be able to ‘actually’ fly it, but would get about an hour aloft, sitting at the front, throwing soldiers out at 13,000 feet. Not having ‘actually’ flown anything more than a box truss for the last few months anyway, and feeling definitely ‘skill rusty’, I was definitely OK with that. Being given flying control of this heavy bird with a pack of Britain’s crack paratroops snarling behind me was furthest from my mind…    

Capt. Dick Daredevil, the duty pilot, met me under the wing of the twin-engined, turbo-prop Islander jump ‘plane. He looked everything you would expect a Para pilot to look. The black moustache above a broad smile on a healthy, sun-tanned face that radiated experience and confidence. Eyes that told of Kosovan conflicts and Gulf engagements. I felt totally safe with the idea of flying with the guy wearing the red beret.

“O.K., Pat, we’re just refuelling then Dave will be along to fly you. He’s the Senior Pilot.”

So Capt. Daredevil wasn’t flying me after all, I was to be honoured with the ‘Senior Pilot’

“Don’t be worried by his leg, though,” he added with a smile, “he’s actually a really good pilot…” 

Capt. Dave Rubberleg, dressed in ‘T’ shirt and dirty shorts, hobbled towards me, dragging his disabled and near useless left leg behind him, with his right arm extended before him. Assuming it to be his method of maintaining balance, I ignored his outstretched hand, before realising that he was offering a greeting. His unkempt grey hair perfectly matched his gnarled grey face. Throwing away his cigarette, he coughed his way through our brief exchange of, his vast and my lamentable, flying experience, then, hauling himself awkwardly into the left hand seat, he picked up his gammy leg, dragging it into the aircraft behind him and dropped it onto the left-hand rudder pedal. Turning, he cheerily assured me that flying this was just the same as flying the little two-seat, single engine Cessna 152 I had trained in. I strapped myself nervously and tightly into the right hand seat of the cramped cockpit as he started the engines. 

Behind me, sprawled on the aircraft floor were eight or nine big-bastard Paras, eyeing both Capt. Rubberleg and myself with malevolent anxiety. “Dave doesn’t normally do us,” and “who’s that nonce with ‘im?” were among some of the hoarse-whispered exchanges I overheard.

A quick trundle along the narrow, bumpy grass strip and we were aloft, climbing steeply into the cloudless sky. Noticing the slow airspeed, I nervously enquired as to the stall speed. That is, the speed at which the aircraft stops flying; when it goes so slow that it stops being a ‘plane and suddenly generates the lift of your average grand piano being tipped out of a thirtieth floor hotel window. “I’ll show you later”, he said, “when we’ve got rid of these fat bastards at the back.” I wish I hadn’t asked and wanted to get out with the Paras.

We climbed quickly to 7,000 feet where preparations were made to throw out the first of the hapless Paras. Left side door open and left engine power reduced and feathered, the sudden loss of several bodies from the back shifted the centre of gravity, pitching the nose of the ‘plane down. “Fat bastards!” shouts Capt. Rubberleg as he pulls the nose back up and re-trims the aircraft.

Capt. Rubberleg then took his hands off the controls and lifted his gammy leg off the rudder pedals. “Here, just keep her straight and level for me, will you, whilst I fiddle with these knobs and switches. You have control.” I took the controls without thinking; then felt my sphincter tighten and mouth go dry. I was flying the bloody thing! Hadn’t anyone told him I was just supposed to be an observer? Did the Paras realise they were now being flown by a stoned hippie? I kicked a bit of rudder just to feel how responsive she was and to make sure I had control. I had. 

 “The trick is to keep on this heading and not get too close to the village, down there on your right,” Capt. Rubberleg mumbled as he fiddled with his bits, “‘cos the locals start complaining about noise. Oh, and don’t drift to the left, either. (He points to a vast scrubland criss-crossed with tank tracks and shell holes). That’s the shooting range and they’re playing with live mortars today. Those buggers reach 10,000 ft. before they start going back down again, y’know.” We were at 7,000 feet. He pointed to a large stone cross set into a patch of grass on the edge of the range. “That’s where a Belgian jump ‘plane ended up a few years ago. Pilot got his approach to the field wrong and one of our boys lobbed a mortar through his wing at 5,000 feet. My tip would be to stay away from that area.” I did.

This man was full of tips and tricks. “The trick is…” he would say, or “My tip here…” he would offer, as if the key to flying this bloody great thing was merely the acquisition of a few informal bits of common sense picked up in the club house.

“EXIT! EXIT! EXIT!” bellowed Capt. Rubberleg and bodies threw themselves through the open side door. He climbed us to 13,000 feet and positioned us for the last of the jumpers to exit. Once gone, with door closed, he turned to me, pulling that gammy old leg off the rudders and said, “You were asking me about the stall speeds of this thing…you have control, let’s do it.”

I pulled back the stick slowly and somewhat reluctantly, watching the airspeed drop. The first stall and recovery was quite gentle. With no power and no flaps, it just sort of waddled about a bit, but a quick look at the Vertical Speed Indicator showed that we were descending at a rate faster than was strictly aviation. So it’s stick forward, nose down, break the stall, get flying speed and apply power. Ah, how it all comes back! Too easy!

I shouldn’t have impressed him. He immediately set the ‘plane up for a stall ‘in the approach configuration’. This means flaps down and power on. The resulting stall can be quite alarming. As I pulled back more and more on the stick the aircraft started to shudder and shake violently as we became a large airborne, yet plummeting, brick.  I felt sure the bloody wings were going to drop off. The instruments in front of me were now a vibrating blur. Then the nose dropped suddenly, along with the contents of my bowels. I pushed the stick forward immediately and got the thing flying again as the smell of my fear wafted around the cockpit. 

 “OK, take me home. I’ll call headings, heights and speeds. You’ll be fine, just point the nose down and keep the speed out of the orange but right on the edge of the green, oh, and stick on about 30 degrees of bank.”

 What you want me to do, then, I mused, is to put the ‘plane into a steep, turning power dive…I obliged.

I was soon in a 45 degree steep, descending turn, the nose of the ‘plane pointing very, very down indeed. The needle of the Air Speed Indicator flickering on the very edge of the orange bit on the dial that says “VNE” or “Velocity Never Exceed” that loosely translates as, “This aircraft will start to shake and shudder uncontrollably and will then disintegrate violently if you continue to fly it in this manner.”

So this was the ‘military style’ descent I’d heard so much about. You can’t afford to bugger about up there, you see. Some arse is quite likely to be trying to shoot you down. I try and get a fix on the mortars popping away on the spinning battlefield below, now hurtling towards me.

Now, in my usual mind-set of a low hour, pootle-about-the-skies-gingerly-avoiding-risk-in-a-slow-single-engine, this was what my old instructor would call “an unusual attitude”. It’s amazing the amount of euphemism there is in aviation terminology. ‘Unusual attitude’ is more readily understood by your average humble, private pilot as, “You’re gonna die a very sudden and violent death if you don’t do something about this RIGHT NOW!”  An ‘unusual attitude’ is, thus, one to be avoided.

 But now, under the supervision and express instruction of a British Army, Parachute Regiment, Senior Jump Pilot, I revelled in the ‘g’ forces pushing me hard into my seat, forcing my chin into my chest. I ignored all the instruments spinning and tumbling chaotically in front of me. Adrenalin induced, a manic grin fixed itself to my face. I was now entering the dreaded spiral dive, ever faster, ever tighter: the Kennedy killer. Time to take some of the bank off and bleed off some speed, but this is too much fun…! I’m sure Captain Dave Rubberleg will tell me when to pull out. He’s in charge. He knows what he’s doing. I watched him grin blissfully out of the window at the rapidly approaching ground.

 “Now my tip here,” said Captain Dave, in a slow Yorkshire accent, pausing to consider whether it was even worth passing on the tip, as the needle on the Air Speed Indicator rapidly approached the red bit, “would be… just ease back on the power a touch and gently raise the nose. That’ll keep us all nicely part of a flying aircraft, you see, rather than a bloody great plummeting rock with no wings.”

After asking me to pull back the speed and level off at 1500 feet, I turned onto the heading he gave me and there ahead, oh joy, deep, deep joy, beyond some trees and tall pylons, was the narrow grass strip we left some thirty minutes ago.

“Now the trick here is to stay high enough to avoid those power lines, but then drop low over the trees so you don’t miss the airfield and land on the officer’s golf course beyond.” I waited for him to take control. He didn’t. He’s going to let me land the thing! I gave her just a little squirt of power to ease us over the pylons, then closed power to a trickle as we cross the trees, dropping onto the grass strip just beyond. Stick back and nose up and…yes! I greased it. Perfect!

“D’you want to do that again?” he asked as we taxi to pick up more Paras. I couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off my face. As we climbed out and he gave me the controls once more, I came.

Oh, yeah. I had to do a show later that night. The annoying things you have to do to pay for playtime…